Ex-Grayscale CEO shifts focus to tokenization

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Grayscale-related headlines have been aplenty this year, from GBTC’s conversion to an ETF, its outflows, the product’s spin-off, more filings and trust launches, yada yada.  

A tangential update (also surfacing today) is that Grayscale’s former CEO, Michael Sonnenshein, joined Securitize as its chief operating officer. 

So the ex-leader of one of the largest crypto asset managers shifts his focus to bringing real-world assets (RWA) onchain — “which candidly I think is one of the most exciting frontiers in the broader blockchain and digital assets space,” Sonnenshein told me this morning.  

While at Grayscale, Sonnenshein worked on bringing digital assets into more traditional wrappers. At Securitize, he acknowledged, it’ll pretty much be the other way around.   

The tokenized RWA market has lots of room to run before some lofty projections are met. One point of agreement at Brooklyn’s RWA Summit I attended in October was that the specific utility and benefits (and the economics behind that) will be what drives tokenization forward. 

Tokenized fiat currencies (aka stablecoins, a roughly $200 billion market) are well-established. Securitize helped BlackRock tokenize its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) in March, which has helped spotlight another use case.   

After all, US Treasurys (which BUIDL is backed by) are the collateral serving as the “substrate” for many capital markets transactions, Sonnenshein said. 

He added: “Continuing to build products that can address some of the inefficiencies and … move into offerings where the underlying assets are not dollars, but instead yield-bearing assets, I think is a very, very attractive value proposition.”

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